UBERSIMPLE GETS LIVE VERTICAL SCALING - FAST AND EASY WITH NO DOWNTIME OR REBOOT

Situation

UberSimple creates AppPack- a mobile application that allows conference/trade show attendees to quickly create, share, and grow various types of contact and information and collateral before, during, and long after an event.

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Originally, after evaluating numerous providers, UberSimple chose to work with Amazon’s EC2 for their development, staging, and production environments, in addition to hosting their public website and private customer portal.

“We were ‘encouraged’ to sign-up with the leading provider,” says Brad Durbin, UberSimple’s Founder and CEO. “However, once we got started we found that it was exceedingly difficult to work with and manage the EC2 dashboard/management console – so much so that we had to hire a specialist to assist us with EC2 deployment and maintenance.”

“The complexity of EC2 is actually a deterrent to business because it causes a distraction from the actual goals of the business, adds Durbin. “ In addition, they don’t offer ‘real’ support services which left us spending significant time combing through FAQs, knowledge base, and usergroups in search of assistance.”

A venture capitalist recently asked me how I have been able to control costs despite our incredible growth? I told him that ProfitBricks was more efficient than Amazon EC2. There is no need to add more servers - ProfitBrick’s live vertical scaling allows us to simply add more resources whenever we need it with no downtime and no additional capital outlay. ProfitBricks is our cloud computing IaaS partner.

Brad Durbin, CEO

Solution

While not specifically looking for a replacement provider, UberSimple heard about ProfitBricks at an industry event. The ProfitBricks Data Center Designer was the initial attraction.

“The DCD provides us with a live graphic overview of our entire Virtual Data Center. The technology is incredibly robust, yet so simple that we’ve actually used it during sales presentations with prospective customers to demonstrate how easy it is to scale our environment,” says Durbin.

Acting as a “virtual white board,” the Data Center Designer (DCD) is a “drag-and-drop” graphical user interface to help customers configure and manage their own virtual data center. Once satisfied with the structure, the data center can be activated with just a simple mouse-click, avoiding the complicated forms and tables required with 1st generation cloud computing providers.

Benefits

Flexible, Simpler, Easier to Use

While very powerful and sophisticated, ProfitBricks is surprisingly simple and easy to use. “The ProfitBricks platform, including the DCD, is much more clean and natural data center environment, rather than an assorted bundle of various servers and services that other providers make you string together,” says Antonio B, UberSimple’s CTO. “Our Profitbricks Virtual Data Center is structured exactly as we would have set-up if we had done it ourselves. On top of that, it is so intuitive; we don’t need any extra support services.”

The ProfitBricks environment allows customers to completely customize their entire deployment, from a simple infrastructure backbone to a complex layout with substantial resources. Individual data center components, such as firewalls, sub-networks, and load balancers can easily be added with a simple mouse click. You select what you need and the DCD automatically provisions it.

Greatly Increased Speed and Performance

ProfitBricks operates an 80Gbit/s backend meshed InfiniBand network – 8x faster than typically deployed 1 or 10 Gbit/s Ethernet that is commonly used by other hosting companies – and CPU cores that equate to two to four compute units elsewhere.

Since moving to ProfitBricks, UberSimple has seen huge gains in speed and performance vs. AWS. One of the big reasons behind this was that ProfitBricks offers dedicated resources (CPU Cores, RAM) for truly virtual datacenters. Unlike other providers, ProfitBricks CPU cores are dedicated for your exclusive use and not shared among multiple customers.

The pricing models among most cloud computing IaaS providers are astonishingly confusing and complex. Charges are often calculated according to criteria that are simply unknown to customers, such as I/O requests to a storage system. The consequence of this creative pricing is often that the costs are difficult to impossible to estimate with the end-result being an unpleasant surprise when the credit card invoice arrives. In addition, other providers have hefty extra fees for high-availability storage, personal support and system admin level troubleshooting

The ProfitBricks pricing model is the most simple and efficient among all cloud computing IaaS providers. In a nutshell, just like with an electric utility bill, customers pay only for the memory, storage, CPU/ processor, and bandwidth resources that are actually consumed. ProfitBricks calculates usage fees on a per-minute basis without any minimum-hourly usage requirements. No monthly subscription plans. No advance deposit or pre-payment. No peak/off-peak resource bidding.

UberSimple required 2.5 (full-time equivalent) systems administrators to manage the complexity inherent with EC2. Concurrent with the move to ProfitBricks, UberSimple now requires .5 FTE to complete the same tasks – an 800% savings. “We are a mobile application development company it does not make financial sense for us to have a team of system level experts, just to handle the deployment and management of our application in the cloud”, said Durbin.